Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Voluntary Information Disclosure And Corporate Governance Of The Listed Companies

The relationship between voluntary information disclosure and corporate governance is a more attractive and important topic for both theoreticians and positivists. On the base of mandatory, voluntary disclosures make corporate disclosures more complete and specific, and improve the quality of corporate disclosure, which is helpful in getting rid of information dissymmetry and incompleteness, in realizing fairness and efficiency of capital market. Because of these, people pay more and more attention on voluntary disclosures. Western scholars have done a lot of researches on those, but internal scholars have done a little on them, especially on empirical research. In addition, as most of the prior studies focus on data from publicly held companies in the USA, so many foreign research results on voluntary disclosures are not fit for listed Chinese companies effectively. Then, this paper empirically examines the linkages between corporate governance and the extent of voluntary disclosures in annual reporting provided by listed Chinese companies.In this paper, corporate governance is characterized by five attributes, which are the proportion of outside ownership, the proportion of government agencies, ownership concentration, CEO duality and the proportion of independent directors to total number of directors on the board. In addition, firm size, firm profitability, firm leverage and foreign fund are chosen as the control variables. This paper randomly selected 120 listed companies in Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange according to its industrial ratio and then conducted empirical research. The results indicate that the proportion of outside ownership, firm size, firm profitability, and foreign fund are significantly and positively related to the extent of voluntary disclosures, while the coefficients for the other independent variables are insignificant. Meanwhile, the descriptive statistics on the extent of voluntary disclosures disclosed by 60 listed Chinese companies from 2001 to 2006 shows that, on the whole, listed Chinese companies'extent of voluntary disclosures is small, but is increasing clearly.Based on the empirical evidences, this paper provides some advices about constructing the suitable information disclosure system, making out voluntary disclosure index of listed companies, perfecting the governance structure of listed companies, supervising the voluntary disclosure etc for the development of voluntary disclosure of the listed Chinese companies.